What are Amazon Sponsored Ads?
Sellers who want to increase the discoverability of their products on Amazon, pay for these top positions by bidding on relevant keywords, which will lead to higher visibility in the Amazon Search engine result pages or SERPs. The advertiser will then be charged for every click made by a shopper on their ad.
Sponsored Ads for Amazon are those ads that are placed on the top of Amazon’s search results page because the advertiser paid for them to be placed there. When you search for a specific product in Amazon’s search bar, you will be able to notice that the top products have a subtle text saying “sponsored” or “ad.” These are sponsored ads.
When shoppers click on your sponsored product ad, they’ll be directed to your ad’s product detail page. These ads are keyword targeted and are displayed on the top or bottom of the search results page.
Sponsored video ads for Amazon
Sponsored video ads are relatively new ad formats that are incorporated into the search results page. The video ads are what make your product’s ad stand out from everything else on the same page and take you a step ahead in the competition.
Recently, Amazon widened the scope of the Sponsored Brand Video ads landscape. Now, both mobile app and desktop users can see your videos in action while browsing search results.
A sponsored video ad usually contains four fields:
1. Product Description:
A brand’s product image ad, title, rating, number of reviews, price of the product, and prime eligibility are displayed.
This is displayed over the product title in the top right-hand corner of the video ad.
3. Video:
Once fifty percent of the media is on screen, the video ad will automatically play.
4. Toggle Mute button:
Videos will always start on mute, but customers can click the mute button to mute or unmute.
Why do we need Sponsored Video Ads?
Customers browsing on Amazon are more likely to be at the end of the buyer’s journey (i.e., closer to a purchasing decision). They already know what product they want to purchase, and they are just looking for the best deal and provider. Your video might persuade them to click and view your product.
1. Stay ahead in the competition
It is an acknowledged fact that Amazon Sponsored Ads are one of the most powerful ways to enhance conversion rates and discoverability for your products. As more and more sellers enter the amazon business, the competition would be tough enough to implement much more effective strategies such as video ads.
2. Better Demonstration:
Despite the love for online shopping, customers do miss the feeling of checking out their desired product to their content. SO, why not give them the best of both worlds? No matter how well defined your product ad images are, the video ads provide a close to reality impression of your product, exactly what customers need to trust the seller.
To create compelling video ads that effectively capture the attention of potential customers, consider using online video makers, which offer a user-friendly interface and a variety of features to enhance your creative vision
3. More Click-Through-Rate
Shoppers who want to size up the product before making a purchase have nothing like a video that makes quite an impression and when they see a sponsored brand’s video, they are most likely to stop and take notice.
4. More Conversion Rate
A properly structured video brings in more buyers more often than not. The long-lasting impression made by your ad will have a higher chance of getting converted to a sale.
5. Achieve your target ACOS
Advertising Cost Of Sales, or ACOS, is a metric used to measure the performance of your Amazon PPC campaign. Fewer ACOS means that you’re spending less on advertising but gaining more sales.
Amazon Sponsored Video Ads increase conversion rate, which in turn decreases ACOS.
How to set up a sponsored video ads campaign?
- Go to the Campaign Manager in Amazon Seller Central and make sure you are on the Sponsored Products tab.
- Hit the ‘create campaign’ button.
- Now, you would not find the option under sponsored products. Remember to go to the sponsored brands section in the seller central to upload a video ad.
- Choose your campaign name, whether or not it is a part of an existing portfolio, and set your budget and duration.
- The most important thing here is selecting the video option as we want our ad to be in video format. And selecting these options changes the options below this.
- On the left-hand side, you will be able to see all the products that you sell.
- To select the products that you would want to promote one by one.
- As you scroll down, you will see the option that allows you to upload a video. Now note that your video will take time to get approved as, unlike image ads, it has to go through a manual approval process.
After the approval, do not expect to see immediate results. Give it a few days for it to see if it is working out for you.
This process is similar to creating a regular campaign with approval. There are specific guidelines given by amazon that you must comply with to make a sponsored video ad.
Let’s have a look at them.
Do’s and Don’ts for creating Sponsored Video Ads:
- Keep your content educational, demonstrative and product-focused.
- Do not waste your chance to engage shoppers by starting with an empty frame.
- Though the video can be anywhere between 6 to 45 seconds, the recommended length of the video is 15 to 30 seconds.
- The video file size should not be more than 500 MB.
- Your video ads must not have black bars on any side of the video.
- Amazon does not permit blank or black frames at the start or end of videos.
- The video can be either in .MP4 or .MOV format only.
- Make sure to have an aspect ratio of 16:9
- Amazon rejects your video if :
- Video is abruptly stopped at the maximum video duration
- The video includes customer reviews.
- Empty or Black frames at the start or end of video ads.
Make sure to follow these guidelines while making your video ad for it to get approved. Your video would take around 72 hours to get approved.
Best Practices:
1. Show your product
Research shows that videos that feature the product predominantly within the first second of the ad typically perform better than those that don’t.
2. Loop the video
You can also set the video to play in a loop so that the customers continue to see it in as long as fifty percent of the media is on screen. You can choose to play the video non-stop in a loop or else give a break and restart it again.
3. On-screen text
It is highly recommended to use on-screen text to videos that rely on voice communication to convey the product message. To make sure text can be easily read on smaller screens such as mobile devices, it is recommended to use Helvetica or a similar san-serif font at a minimum size of 80 px.
4. Optimizing Sponsored Video Ads for Amazon:
You need to be really careful and keep observing the report every week or every two weeks to understand how to proceed further. This is called optimization.
Optimizing your video ad to reach the target audience is more important than anything else. There’s no point in making the right Sponsored Brand Video Ad if you aren’t visible to potential buyers.
How to optimize you video ads?
i). Keywords:
Keywords are the next crucial factor in successful Sponsored Video ads for amazon. Some of the mistakes that most sellers make are using too few or too many keywords in their PPC campaigns. Too few keywords won’t get you enough reach and you will be leaving a lot of money on the table while with too many keywords, you may be trying to attract away too wider a range of audience and your conversion rate will fall. Choose just the optimum number of keywords according to match types – broad, phrase and exact.
While choosing your keywords, keep most of them highly relevant to the product. You would not want to attract just clicks to boost your click-through rate, you want them to convert into sales. If you wish to experiment with different types of keywords, create individual campaigns to test them separately by keeping the budget low. You can increase the budget on keywords that work well, and stop campaigns with poor-performing keywords.
ii) Run the Campaign
After setting up your PPC campaigns and editing your videos for the ads, let it run. Let the Sponsored Brand Video run for at least 2 weeks to gather baseline data.
iii). Repeat
NEVER STOP OPTIMIZING!!
After following the above steps, you can improve your campaign by:
- Testing different videos
- Trying different target combinations
- Adjusting campaigns, bids, and budgets based on the insights and results you receive after posting.
Take off negative performing keywords from your list keep adding more relevant key words.
Now that we’ve seen how to create successful Sponsored Video Ads for Amazon, we’ll see whether going through all this is worth the effort.
Are your sponsored product video ads worth it?
Video ads have a higher conversion rate than standard ads. Conversion rate is the ratio of the number of clicks converted to sales to the number of clicks your ad gets. More conversion rate means more successful your ad is in promoting your brand.
So, if your video is eye-catching enough to promote your brand, and if the right strategy is used, there is a high chance that your product will be bought. Plan means how you would want your video to turn out, but other factors such as keyword demand matter too. If your video is top-notch, but you choose irrelevant and highly competitive keywords, your video might not even appear to your target audience. All you have to do is select the right strategy for promoting and advertising your product, give it a few days to get approved, and then you are good to go.
Take Away
Advertising through video Ads for Amazon is an innovative approach to bring in more traffic as they are often eye-catchy for the customers. Pairing the above tips and techniques with what sponsored video ads that work best for your brand, will take you way ahead of the competition.
